


you're the scars on my skin (you're the past I wanna erase)

by lostandlonelybirds (RUNNFROMTHEAK)



Category: Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Feels, Background Tim Drake/Barbara Gordon - Freeform, Bittersweet Ending, But they're also kind of shit at being lovers, But they're kind of shit at being enemies, Canon Blending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson is Bad at Feelings, Dick Grayson is Not Okay, Dick Grayson-centric, Enemies With Benefits, Enemies to Lovers, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Hurt Dick Grayson, Hurt No Comfort, Idiots in Love, Internal Conflict, Jason Todd Has PTSD, Jason Todd is Arkham Knight, Jason Todd is Bad at Feelings, Kind-of Break Up, Love/Hate, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Primal Kink, Non-Explicit Sex, PWP: Pain With Plot, Post-Batman: Arkham Knight, Secret Relationship, Survivor Guilt, The Fic That Answers The Question You Were Afraid to Ask, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Will Jason and Dick Ever Be Allowed Joy?, no beta we die like jason, this fic is out to hurt you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:46:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RUNNFROMTHEAK/pseuds/lostandlonelybirds
Summary: A guilty secret cloaked in darkness. Mutual desire to ward off the loneliness exasperated to the point of love. Too many draws in their endless cycle of sex and violence, too many things they won’t say to anyone, least of all each other.Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, and aren’t they all ghosts at this point? Ghosts of a more hopeful Gotham. Ghosts of a dead father and dead family. Ghosts in suits with symbols they only half-believe in now.*The worst decisions are made by people in love, and this time that decision just happens to be love. Thin line between love and hatred, after all, especially when no one will ever approve.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Donna Troy, Dick Grayson/Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 8
Kudos: 80
Collections: Dick Grayson Fic Exchange 2020





	you're the scars on my skin (you're the past I wanna erase)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts).



> This fic was heavily influenced by two things:  
> One, the songs Lost My Mind by FINNEAS, BLUE by Troye Sivan, and I Know Places by Taylor Swift (title comes from the first!). Two, the lack of unhealthy but not like dubcon relationships in the JayDick tag. Might be because of my recent fandom exposures, but I am currently obsessed with codependent unhealthy dynamics and tried to do it justice here!
> 
> I'm no expert on AK-verse so it might be inconsistent, but bear with me! Also note that I have Dick and Donna living with each other in Blud as partners because yes, and Dick joined the JL instead of Bruce. They aren't present, but I refer to it briefly.
> 
> Read the tags, this fic is out to hurt.
> 
> I hope you like it geckoholic! <3

_"_ _Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,_  
_Seized him with my beautiful form_  
_That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me._

_Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,_  
_took me so strongly with delight in him_  
_That, as you see, it still abandons me not...”_

_― Dante Alighieri, Inferno: A New Verse Translation_

* * *

**Present**

* * *

To all appearances, Jason Todd is _not_ his. They aren't brothers, by blood or titles (one legally dead and one legally disowned with only the faintest frayed string of a dead father-general connecting them). Jason's not his friend; he can count the number of times they’ve met amicably on one hand while the number of times Jason’s shot him is countless. Jason's not his lover, not when there is no _love_ exactly between them. To all appearances, they are nothing. Appearances, however, can often be misleading. Dick knows that more than anyone.

It’s complicated. Their thing. Hidden in the seams of the titles they cling to and discard as easily as a snake shedding skin. Concealed in the smoky sensuality of the thin line they constantly cross over, hatred and desire and other things blurring into a violent haze; reds and greens and blues paling and darkening interchangeably, inexplicably. They carry marks of each other, brimming cups filled with a mutual exchange of relentless desire, limitless and possessive, jealous and defensive. Coagulation and dissolution of tensions, of feelings, eternally relieved and reignited. Frustrated and soothed.

Jason’s supposed to be dead but isn’t, and Bruce _is_ dead. Dick’s breaking apart under the weight of Gotham, and everyone else is gone. Everyone else left. There’s Jason and there’s him and there are hundreds of criminals that laugh themselves right into his fists because he’s _not Batman_. He’s just Nightwing, dancing in between the cold spotlights of a broken city, dashing in and out of sight with a grace he can’t help, as natural to him as breathing. It’s hard being just Nightwing now, hard breathing in the air Bruce had once breathed, the air _Alfred_ had once breathed, and not thinking of them or the plan. _The_ plan. One that was never meant to come to fruition. Bruce Wayne and Batman dead, so Gotham can live.

He doesn’t know how Bruce makes a noble sacrifice such an asshole move but fuck him if he doesn’t.

Dick’s not really used to being alone. He’d moved to Blüd for that very reason, even if he’d lingered on the fence of the two cities, helping B when he could and Donna at all other times. Bruce had given as good a childhood as he’d been capable of providing, but they’re both broken people, and two broken puzzles cut from different materials can’t make a whole, no matter how hard you try. His anger at being replaced has faded over the years, pushed down and glossed over after the multitude of disasters and crises happening seemingly every other week. He’d had to learn to work with Bruce again, with Jason and later Tim (after Jason’s apparent death on the cusp of eighteen) no matter how much it had hurt and how bitter he’d felt. Founding the League had helped with that. Being treated as a hero in his own right by people like Clark and Diana had built him up when everything seemed to want to tear him down, and the friendships he’d found amongst that community sustained him through the loss of Jason, and they’ve done their best to help him through losing Bruce and Alfred.

As much as he lets them help, that is.

It’s easier to keep his distance when Dick should reach out. He can’t handle their pity, can’t handle the sympathetic looks and offers of shoulders to cry on. He’s crafted his mercury into graphene, shifted his liquidity and flexibility into durable, inflexible strength – made himself someone strong enough to weather Gotham without the comfort of a mentor in the wings, someone strong enough to delve between the shadows lingering in between the spotlights of polite society without breaking.

Robin had been sculpted from the softest clay, preciously malleable and soft, baked slowly and capable still of reformations, renovations. Nightwing had been cut from silks and luxury fabrics; designs carefully planned and set, softened by circumstances, and select in tastes. Gotham weaves misery from silk foundations, takes clay, and melts it until it’s pools of pathetic putty beneath a villain of the week’s heel, so he crafts himself from marble instead. He chips away at his flaws, his weaknesses, his excesses, and luxuries until he suits his city, until he’s stronger for it, until he’s capable of weathering the pain and misery of Arkham’s worst and can breathe without choking on the fumes of lives and stars colliding inevitably in the thin tendrils of time like a noose around his throat. Everything is familiar and unfamiliar, breathing a steady exhale he knows and taking a shaky inhale he’s yet to learn, precariously dangling between new and old like the worst tightrope act in history.

Ghosts linger behind closed eyes, whispers of security and promises concealed on shadowed gargoyles he perches on, predatory in his pursuit of crime, of some _outlet_. When he doesn’t think, when he just shuts up and listens to the city’s patterns, he can pretend Bruce is around the corner or behind him, can pretend Alfred’s waiting back at home (the manor will always be home just like the circus will always be home) with a batch of cookies just for him. But his eyes never stay shut, not long enough to forget or long enough to forgive. He misses them like a severed limb, phantom sensations all the more painful when he’s disillusioned of their reality, but he resents them too. He resents Bruce for giving in, he resents Alfred for going along with it, he resents Jason for—

He resents Jason for a lot, not that he ever _says_ it. They both know, just like they both know the blood on Jason’s uniform is rarely his own. Unspoken snipers, mutual ignorance for the sake of half-assed bliss. There’s a padlock on his tongue, carefully placed and expertly looped like a noose around any of the dangerous truths he might speak, confessions he might offer. He kills them as he thinks them with the practiced ease of a conman, ever weaving tales to enrapture those he picks. Dick hates it, hates the lies and the unspoken things and the walls built between them because there _have_ to be some boundaries, some lines drawn in blood that’s not Jason’s and shaped by bitter resentment. He hates it, but their shaky foundations are all they have in the absence of sustainability or compromise, communication all but foreign for all the languages they both speak.

But every time Dick constructs a wall Jason knocks it down. Every time he tries to establish a boundary, it’s laughed at. It’s an addictive sort of codependency, melding more than co-existing, absorbing rather than balancing. They don’t talk about anything important (or anything at all), but they’re in love. They hate each other to some extent – Dick for the blame he’s always cast at Jason for Bruce, Jason for the bitter memories of Robin and Dick’s continued association with Tim – but even that can’t stop this.

A guilty secret cloaked in darkness. Mutual desire to ward off the loneliness exasperated to the point of love. Too many draws in their endless cycle of sex and violence, too many things they won’t say to anyone, least of all each other.

Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, and aren’t they all ghosts at this point? Ghosts of a more hopeful Gotham. Ghosts of a dead father and dead family. Ghosts in suits with symbols they only half-believe in now.

They haunt the same nights, same places, wading around like forgotten echoes with nothing better to do than fight off the ever-present ache of grief, of hopelessness. It’s why he avoids the League now, why he’s isolated himself the way he has. Hope burns more than it helps when it can’t know an end, left unchecked it is far more dangerous than despair.

Adapting to Gotham had been an arduous task after so many years bouncing in and out of its bleak gravity, years dancing just beyond the cataclysmic event horizon that Batman had represented. It’s why he picked independence over legacy. Blüdhaven over Gotham. Gotham’s a bitter city; glitz and glam a cover for the tendrils of malevolence shuddering through the streets. It swallows people whole, encapsulating them in her machinations and woven doom with the illusion of hope until there’s nothing left. _No one_ left.

Even Bruce had fallen victim to the monstrous breath of his city, inevitably. A Christ who created his own crucifixion, saving what remained with infernal forgiveness baptized in blood. Dick’s the holy follower left to the sinning masses, meant to carry on this endless brigade for righteousness and penance. For a more human kind of salvation.

Despite all appearances, Batman is no God. He’d bled and died as human as any other, as unrepentant as any sinner and about as clean as the Narrows. They’re all touched by the darkness they fight, all _tainted_ in some unforgivable way. Not normal, not even a little bit. It manifests in different ways, of course.

Various pathologies; convoluted and fucked up in countless ways. Obsessive, compulsive…Lord knows they can _all_ qualify for an institution if any of them were to be remotely honest with anyone ever. Pathological liars: all psychopaths in their own ways, hopelessly grappling for control in a chaotic battleground. All take, no give. That’s what Gotham feels like now, a greedy home, lecherous and lustful in her sinister designs.

Her Damned Prince is no better, he thinks with a touch of bitterness. Jason’s intentions are as foggy and unclear as Gotham’s, a war of traumas and compassions and urges he can’t quite sift through. Some of which Dick purposefully blinds himself to. He’s tender until he’s callous, soft until he’s sharp, patient until he’s tetchy. A broken man full of beautiful contradictions, the perfect cracked mirror reflecting the dichotomy of Dick’s love and hate and bitter sweetness back at him.

Equal and opposite. Newton’s Third Law at work.

It leaves him here, after all. The action force and its reactionary pair. Jason’s push and Dick’s pull.

As always, it had started with a little bloodshed. Not his, not Jason’s. Some nameless thug colored in big-boy marks that would never truly protect him. He could’ve been in the emerald greens of Nygma, the crimson reds of Joker, the blacks and whites of Dent; it doesn’t matter. _He_ doesn’t matter.

He’s scum – _violent_ , rapist scum – and feeling his jaw crack under Dick’s fists is the kind of revelation Batman’s religion is strict on controlling; a corruption much like pomegranate seeds – harmless at first glance, and poisonous in their aftereffects. He’d seen the monster simmering and loosely coiled under the man’s skin, watched him drag a woman from a too-full, too-hot club into an alleyway he’d been above by accident. It had all been an accident, honestly – fortunate for him and the woman made to be a victim, _un_ fortunate for the scum.

Jason’s watching him from the moment the woman – in kitten heels and a dress ripped at the seams – runs away from her would-be assaulter. Dick can feel his eyes when he throws the first punch, following it up with an overly showy kick they both know is for Jason and Jason _alone_. Dick’s a bit rougher than he needs to be – rougher perhaps than he should be – because being the sole recipient of Jason’s undivided attention is a heady drug. It’s a one-man show with elegance lost on his target (whose attempts at dodging and retaliating are in a category usually reserved for drunks and normal children) but _not_ lost on his lover.

The eyes on him are hungry, and it sends a thrill shooting through Dick’s bloodstream. His opponent (or – in the spirit of being more honest with himself where he can – his punching bag) trips and falls over a tipped over trashcan, and Dick knocks him unconscious with one decisive kick and a little grin to himself. Not as satisfying as his usual alleyway tumbles but satisfying enough to get the ball of his libido rolling.

No sooner had he chained the man to a pipe and sent the GCPD an encrypted message with pick-up instructions coordinates than Jason landed behind him, shadowed and flickering like smoke in Dick’s reality.

Jason’s lips are pulled into a half-smile, shoulders taut with tension as he stalks forward, every inch the predator his time away from Gotham had made him into. With every two steps Jason moves, Dick moves back. A dance only they know the moves too, leading each other away from the unconscious man – irrelevant in the colors Dick’s already pushed from his mind – and towards something far more dangerous.

“Catch me,” Dick whispers, a hint of challenge carried by the wind. His heart pounds in his ears, the beat of the city just beneath it. His limbs feel tightly coiled – the _opposite_ of the scum’s monster – and ready to spring into action. This is a game, after all. One of their favorite games.

He can tell the moment Jason hears it by the flare of heat in his black-blue eyes, like candles in the darkness. Everything in him screams _danger_ to Dick’s brain, a red flag he doesn’t ignore so much as savor. It only makes him more aroused.

“ _Run_.”

He’s off before he remembers to breathe, hands finding places to grab, feet kicking off walls faster than he can register. It’s pure instinct he runs on now, fast and steady with his pulse a prestissimo conducted primarily by the shadow of Jason lingering just out of reach, just out of _sight_.

He’s prey, dancing between spots of light and spots of warmth to avoid his pursuer. He goes high, as he always does, losing Jason just as quickly as he gains him. They both know this is a delicate balance, and that one wrong move grants the other victory. One misstep. One hesitation.

Dick never hesitates. Hesitation had been trained out of him long before he’d become a Bat, an important part of being an acrobat without a safety net. Go big or go home. In other words, die as you live – boldly.

In this little game of theirs he never hesitates (that’s _Jason’s_ role, after all) but he can misstep. He can pick the wrong path, can flip too high or too low, and leave just enough time for Jason to catch him, just enough weakness left for Jason to pounce on.

Dick doesn’t hesitate, but he underestimates, slipping into the shadows they both call home thinking his predator has lost his scent. Jason’s arms wrap around him tightly, crooked smile all teeth against his ear.

“ _Found you_ ,” he whispers, languid and heavy like a set of chains around Dick’s rationality, his sense of control. “ _Mine_.”

Dick shivers beneath him, baring his neck for Jason’s eager teeth. He feels the suction of Jason’s love as his skin is taken between those sharp teeth, teased, and caressed. _Worshipped_ , in a way. A carnal religion of their own making, free from Bruce’s ghost for the moment.

Jason’s hands find Dick’s hips, pushing him against the wall until his back is flat against it, until his hair catches on the scratchy material of the wall and his noises are swallowed by Jason’s. He feels it as Jason’s leg slides neatly between his own, as his teeth catch on Dick’s lips and blood flavors their kiss. Dick gives as Jason takes, and Jason gives as Dick takes. They’re both bleeding into their mutual attempts to devour each other the longer it goes on, as the hum of city life around them creates an other-worldly ambiance; it’s as if the real world is _separate_ from this copper-infused reality, separate from their warmth of privacy and shadows and lies. The cold is cutting – severing – in reality, but they can co-exist in this moment without fear of severance.

“Let go, Pretty Bird,” Jason says against his pulse, one hand curled in the baby hairs at Dick’s nape and the other tight around his waist. “Let _go_.”

Dick fists the leather of Jason’s jacket in his hands roughly, tugging until Jason gets the hint and takes it off. His suit gets the same treatment; zipper ripped until it’s left to gather at his waist, bared of the armor and protection from Jason’s all-consuming heat. From there, it’s a frantic frenzy, remaining boundaries guarding one against the other discarded, torn off carelessly. They don’t have lube or preparation time or anything but their bared skin, sweat-laced and hungry, and a mutual desire to _consume_ absolutely. Completely.

Jason’s hot as he presses closer, a feverish inferno that slowly seeps into Dick’s own skin, his own bloodstream, barreling past any other thoughts that aren’t him or them or _this_.

It’s beautiful.

_It’s horrible._

It’s Heaven.

_And it most **certainly** is Hell._

* * *

**Past**

* * *

Their first kiss tastes like menthol and whiskey, bitter and sweet and warm as the flavors meld in Dick’s mouth, each glide of tongue against his sending a new wave of sparks throughout him. He doesn’t know how it started, where Dick ends and Jason begins, but he doesn’t have the presence of mind to care. They meld inexplicably, a kaleidoscope of reds and blues and greys against the neon-ridden skyline. There's teeth and tongue and something _simmering_ in every increasingly frantic smack of lips against his. It’s carnal, dangerous, and Dick only feels the inexplicable desire to stoke that carnality, excite it to its maximum. He’s pushed back against the wall, Jason’s chest hard against his own, Jason’s driving everything else out of mind, and he should care. He should be wary. He should stop this.

Dick _doesn’t_ stop this because he’s a touch-starved, reckless idiot with control issues, as Donna would phrase it.

He threads his fingers through the silken-strands and _pulls_ , pulls until Jason’s lips break from his, and he pants, throat exposed and vulnerable. Dick latches on to his pulse point, ready and eager and fueled by something he doesn’t really want to analyze. He knows they’ve been approaching this for months, _years_ maybe, but he’s been resisting – abstaining – for Gotham and Justice and the desire to cling to safer affections (like a lost romance with Koriand’r, doomed from the start, or a broken one with Zatanna Zatara, not strong enough to weather the distance or wear and tear of this life) that can’t hurt him any more than they already have.

But he’s lonely. Jason’s lonely. They’re alone, and they’re together, and no one and nothing is here to stop them from making this _very clearly_ colossal mistake. He nips at the bared skin around Jason’s collarbone, painting a portrait of animalistic desperation as Jason’s nails clench in his ass, breathy _ah, ah’s_ escaping every so often like something precious. He chases those noises, right back up to Jason’s thinned lips he can _feel_ the tension in.

“Stop thinking,” he murmurs against Jason’s pulse, pretending for a moment he isn’t overanalyzing every word and move made tonight that could have possibly lead to this. “Just… _do_.”

“Easier said than done,” he says bitterly, the _J_ scar rippled and prominent in the shitty lighting. “Last time I did that, I got this.”

“A little blue-balls never killed anyone.”

“It will if we don’t get a move on.”

Dick shuts him up with another kiss, winding his arms up and around Jason’s neck to pull him closer, deeper. Heat…it’s so _warm_ , startlingly warm. Not the cold winter night, not the frostiness lingering in Commissioner Gordon’s tone, not the memories of Bruce and Alfred and everything he’s lost—

But then he remembers. He _remembers_. As Jason’s teeth tease his lower lip, as his hands glide up from his ass to his waist, holding him steady, he thinks about the things he’s been avoiding thinking about ever since Jason crashed his patrol. Again. For the third time this week.

He remembers the fear gas. He remembers the words and the cruelty and Babs in danger, _Tim_ in danger. He remembers Bruce’s pale face, ashen as he’d announced the destruction, the incoming annihilation of Dick’s past and Dick’s rebuilt foundations. He remembers the grief like a monster in his ribcage, a hysterical pain miserably clawing its way through the layers of calcified phosphates to echo as a scream through the silent streets.

Silence, so bitter and loud in the absence of Bruce. In the absence of Alfred. All he’s known and loved for so long. The anchors he’d needed after his parents’ deaths. The first ones to really _care_ …

Jason’s hands feel like poison, suddenly, like acid eating through his clothes, eating away at what self-respect he still has. This feels wrong, and he’s so _fucking_ angry he doesn’t understand it. It takes a moment to gather his resolve and shove Jason off, push him back and extract himself from that bruising grip, that intensity – _instability_ – in cobalt eyes almost as dark as the night sky.

Dick wants to pull away entirely and pull him closer. He wants to punch him, and he _still_ wants to kiss him.

“Dick?”

He shouldn’t blame Jason, but he does. Or maybe he should blame him. Maybe he _should_ hate him. But he can’t. He _can’t_. He’s tried and he’s failed and Jason's presence here is half the reason Tim and Babs aren’t speaking to him at the moment. The other half has something to do with the rings on their fingers and a strong desire to avoid anything Batman related for the next forever. He thinks he understands it, thinks he can sympathize with it. He’d run if he could, but that’s not in his nature. He clings to the destruction, the chaos. Trauma holds him close, like a lover, because running makes him a victim. He’s _never_ been a victim.

“Dick?”

Jason’s closer, eyes open and closed at once. His jaw clenches and unclenches like he can’t settle on an expression, or mood, or state of mind – _unstable_ , Dick’s mind hisses viciously, the recording of Jason’s cries for mercy from the Joker on loop behind his blinking eyes – and Dick can’t either. Mistake. Mistake. _Mistake._

But _why_ does that word seem to lose all meaning when Jason’s hand cups his cheek? When the shutters on his eyes open just barely, a glimmer of uncertainty revealed to _Dick_ and _only_ Dick? When his pretty long lashes cast shadows over that scar, that _mark_ , and he looks so painfully vulnerable that Dick’s breaking inside for him?

It’s not a conscious decision to slam Jason Todd into the brick wall he’d been crowded against – one hand on his throat and one fisted in his hair – but it _is_ a decision. Lips find his again, coaxing and gentle, but Dick doesn’t _want_ softness now. He doesn’t _want_ to be kissed like a lover, gentle rutting between silk sheets with candles and chocolates and crooning love songs carefully selected to set the mood. He wants to fuck, wants to _be_ fucked. He wants this tight yarn of tangled ugliness to unravel, he wants to not want this.

He wants everything and nothing at all.

“Don’t,” Dick hisses, teeth sharp against Jason’s neck. “Don’t say a thing.”

Jason huffs out a laugh that’s colder than before, a touch of acidity Dick wants to _taste_ , so he does. He takes and he takes, he tears and claws and bites and _marks_ as they rut against each other like animals. Melding, colliding, _destroying_.

Uniforms are pulled off roughly, grunts and hisses and low noises that could be from pain or pleasure (those wires seem to have irrevocably crossed in Dick’s mind) as everything is laid bare and armored at once. They’re both navigating fields of landmines, spitting and poisonous as Jason’s incendiary temper reacts to Dick’s, fire fueling fire with neither of them showing any sign of burning out.

It’s almost too easy to push Jason’s face into the wall, to slick up those thighs and take his pleasure from that sickeningly sweet torturous contact. It’s too much and not enough at once, the excruciating _burn_ of skin on skin, the exquisite _ache_ of longing and loneliness and touch starvation satiated by another warm body, another set of noises and low rumbles, another pulse against his traitorous fingertips.

Jason’s cursing under his breath, a beautiful symphony of expletives only broken by the off-beat cadence of his name – _Dick, Dick, Dick_ – like a prayer in the middle of a rock song. It sounds wrong and right, and Dick’s lips feel the need to taste it off Jason’s tongue, delving into that heat once more as they rock together – _cling_ together – as much skin connected as they can bear sliding together and separately in unison.

“Fuck,” Dick curses roughly, breaking from the intoxication of heated kisses to try and _think, breathe, exist_ , but Jason’s so debauched it drives him to distraction. He chases that mindless passion as he catalogs the elegant curve of Jason’s throat as it arches, the arc of Jason’s broad and muscular back as he meets Dick’s intensity with his own. He loses himself in the tiny prick of blood beading on Jason’s lower lip, the tangled mess of his hair, the way he smells – gunpowder and nighttime air with a faint tang of copper he doesn’t want to focus on. Jay’s wearing cologne too, not that he can identify it by scent. “Shit.”

Jason finishes with a low noise trapped in his throat, the hum of which Dick feels as they kiss, but can’t quite hear in its entirety. He joins not long after, panting and slick with sweat, still clinging to Jason like he’s the only solid thing in this murky world of gray, the only light in their shared world of shadows. They are all that’s left, after all. They only have each other now.

His anger drains out of him bit by bit, slow and serene as his mind quiets and his anger’s sharp edge dulls. Dick examines the bruised-in fingerprints around Jason’s waist with some modicum of satisfaction, along with every other tender mark he’d left. Jason looks like he’d been attacked, and it’s satisfying. It’s _right_.

That hollow ring of _wrong_ echoes as a bitter aftertaste, silent and judgmental as he pushes it into the recesses of his mind and lingers in the afterglow. It’s a one-time thing, so what’s the harm? Jason isn’t sustainable. _Dick_ isn’t sustainable. They’re half-adversaries, half-frenemies at the _best_ of times, and attempted murder is hardly the best foundation for a relationship.

So, he won’t date Jason.

He deigns to ignore the pang at the thought and shoves the overthinking shit he knows he’ll need to do at some point (or he’ll explode) into the Tomorrow-Dick’s problem pile.

Jason’s as silent as he is, and he thinks they both take comfort in that. It’s enough to know that someone’s there, that you aren’t alone in a city that wants to eat you alive.

For now, it’s enough.

( _Somehow, despite the sentiment remaining unspoken, he's sure Jason's thinking the same thing. They both know it's a lie_ )

* * *

**Present**

* * *

The early morning air is cold when he manages to coax himself from Jason’s arms and collect the scattered pieces of his suit. It’s still dark as he pries open the window, wary of making too much noise and arousing Jason from his sleep. He doesn’t get enough of it as it is. What little he does get is plagued by night terrors and episodes of sleepwalking – sporadic enough that there’s no discernable pattern. They don’t talk about it of course, but Dick worries about it in the quiet of his mind, where it can’t disturb the fragile peace they find in each other.

And he goes where he always goes when he needs to think and needs the space to _allow_ thinking; up high. On top of the tallest building in Gotham, without a soul to see him.

Despite the early-late hour, Gotham pulses with life. He feels it as he breathes in, eyes closed and the world around him blissfully subdued. He sees it as he breathes out, eyes open to every color the rising sun paints this filthy city of his in. The air feels different, away from that oppressive heat of Jason’s pursuit, or even the cold of _pursuing_. It feels free. It feels right without the after taste of wrong. It feels…

It feels like home.

And that’s where Donna finds him: alone, high up on Wayne Tower’s roof and far removed from humanity. The marks from Jason’s attentions are thankfully covered by the makeup he always carries, but something in her eyes tells him she sees through the oils and chemicals to his guilty sins. Laid bare despite his suit and defenses and deflections.

It had only been a matter of time, but he _really_ wants to be wrong. No one is supposed to know, after all.

“So,” Donna starts off with, plopping next to him and dangling her legs high above the city without a trace of discomfort. “Jason’s good, I’m guessing?”

Dick nods, throat tight, looking anywhere but her.

“Good.” She hums lightly; an attempt at filling the silence with something familiar. She likes thinking over her words carefully, weighing them on a scale of bluntness and sweetness only she can see. Absently, he wonders how sweet the acrid truth will sound in her honeyed tones with endearments breaking up the ugliness.

He’s not ashamed of Jason, but he _is_ ashamed of himself. Of what he’s doing. What _they_ are doing. He’s ashamed of the fact that being with Jason is accepting his bad, his _righteous_ reckonings bestowed upon the worst of Gotham, and that Dick’s not strong enough to end it entirely as he should. As he should have far before they’d fallen into bed together.

“Haven’t talked to him in a while,” she comments lightly, like there isn’t the heaviness of Dick’s secret bearing down on them. “We were cool before the whole mess with Arkham, obviously. He texted me to ask about you when you weren’t in Gotham and always wanted to make sure I was looking out for you. It was adorable.”

Dick nods again, wary of what he might say if he opens his mouth. Pandora’s box, after all. Some things are better left unexplored. He should’ve known better than to satisfy his curiosity, but it’s too late for regret and hopes of stopping their doomed romance.

Donna bumps his shoulder with hers, smile faint and real. She smells as she always does – vanilla, sunshine, and a hint of something sharp and spicy beneath it – and it’s soothing. _Comforting_. She’s always been someone he can go to with anything, and he always has. Except for this.

 _Never_ with this.

“Not very talkative. Dickie, I’m not judging you for it. This…this isn’t me _condemning_ you or trying to stage an intervention.”

“Maybe you should,” Dick murmurs, feeling the warmth of her body as she doesn’t pull her shoulder from his. She scoots in a little closer, arms bared to the winter air, and Dick lets her lean in without trying to pull away. He can’t read her expression; she’s flickering between emotions too fast. “Maybe it should be.”

Were she Hal or Barry, she’d make some kind of attempt at cracking the tension with a bad joke. Something along the lines of, _is he that bad in bed_?

She isn’t them though, so she sits on his words with an air of contemplation, turning them over in her head and carefully pulling them apart. Her reply leaves her mouth slowly, dripping like blackstrap molasses more so than honey.

“If you think that you shouldn’t be with him, why are you?”

Dick huffs out a laugh, watching it color the air briefly before fading away into obscurity. Donna’s slow breaths color it too, mixed with his air.

“Isn’t that the question?”

She quirks a brow at him, unimpressed by the deflection. _Dr. Troy_ , he almost jokes. _Always trying to solve your friends’ problems._

“No duh,” she says, shifting forward enough to jab an elbow into his unguarded gut. A breath of air escapes his mouth in a grunt, and he guards his stomach after a quick glare. Of course, her lips are pulled into a smug grin when he looks at her, entirely without remorse.

 _Bitch_ , he thinks without any real heat.

 **“** Do you love him?”

“I shouldn’t.”

She rests her head on his arm, breathing out a shaky sigh.

“You’re your own worst critic, Boy Wonder. What’s so wrong about loving him?”

“Can we possibly _not_ talk about this?” Dick mutters.

That earns him a flick on the nose, and an obnoxious gesture he’s pretty sure Roy is 100% to blame for teaching her.

“Rude.”

She snorts.

“Because I’m normally _so_ ladylike. Now, spill the beans, or I’ll be forced to take drastic measures. Your subject changes don’t work on me.”

Dick sighs, weary and hesitant and tense enough that he’d be indistinguishable from a corpse after rigor mortis set in. Donna’s hand glides across the blades of his shoulders soothingly, gently, and it’s only that familiar intimacy that gives him the strength to actually use his _words_ (something he’d become incredibly adept at avoiding ever since Bruce’s death).

“We…it’s not healthy,” he breathes out, nerves chittering like tiny cockroaches beneath his skin, an all-over unpleasant crawling sensation as his tongue wraps around the words severely. In a way, this feels like a confession, a temporary loan of his weight out to Donna. All that’s missing really is the box and any hope that some number of Hail Mary’s can save him from this. “I know… _we_ know it’s not healthy. We don’t talk, and we can’t even really _think_ too much, or we fight. It’s this pattern of avoidance and sex and weak tethers of _feelings_ that trap us both in this vicious cycle. I _hate him,_ Donna, I hate him so much that I can’t think straight sometimes, but I love him too. And he hates _me_ too. It’s not right, but I can’t stop. _We_ can’t stop. I can’t even tell what little bit of my family remains because he’s indirectly responsible for the deaths of the two people who raised me after my parent’s died.”

Dick swallows the lump in his throat, but still feels that frustrating sheen of tears in his eyes.

“What…what kind of _person_ can love someone like that? Someone who hurt my _family_ , who hurts people on a daily _basis_? How can I love someone whose hands are always going to be covered in blood? How am I supposed to—”

_How am I supposed to love him when I hate him, and how I supposed to hate him when I love him so?_

He cuts himself off with a self-deprecating laugh, and he wonders if it sounds as bitter and acerbic as it tastes in his throat, bubbling uncontrollably and spilling through the tight seams of his lips. The padlock on his tongue is useless now, in the face of Donna’s concern and that knowledge lingering in her eyes. Knowledge no one should have.

“We only bring each other pain, but the occasional pleasure is enough that we keep coming back. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that, Don?”

Her half-hearted attempts at lightening the darkened atmosphere crumble before his words, eyes as soft as silk sheets and honey when her lips curl downwards in a sympathetic frown.

“Oh, _honey_ —”

And it’s that sweetness – that ruthless compassion Donna wields just as elegantly as she wields a sword – that delivers the final blow to what few defenses keep him from breaking. He slumps into her arms entirely, boneless and molten in her anchoring embrace. She pulls him closer, lets him bury his face in her nape, and cradles his head like he’s something precious. He breathes in her scent to drown out the world at large.

“Shh,” she murmurs, weathering out his tumultuous waves of conflicting emotions, soothing his shivering body as his long-repressed tears spring free and seep into the exposed skin her costume doesn’t shield. “Dickie, it’s okay. It’ll all be okay. I’m here, got it? I’m always here for you.”

And she is, she always will be, but even Donna Troy can’t fix this.

He and Jason are intertwined so deeply, so _fundamentally_ , that Dick’s not sure what is his and what is Jason’s. Severing that bond would be as messy and painful as severing an artery, and it would color all of them with their pain.

He doesn’t think he could survive that. He doesn’t think Jason could survive that.

In the cradle of his best friend’s arms, he marinates in that knowledge, lets it seep down into his bones, and poison him. _Consume_ him. Separation is a hopeless desire, this he knows, but he wants it all the same.

It’s a good thing he’s used to never getting what he wants.

* * *

**Past**

* * *

Their second kiss (or second _time_ kissing) tastes like salt and decay, the remnants of a grand empire crumbling against their burning skin.

After their first (and last, if Dick has any say in it) time crossing into overly familiar territory, Dick avoided Jason like the plague. He’d skipped a few patrols, switched up his routes, and had thrown himself at Blüdhaven’s worst like a Superman wannabe. He’s lost count of how many times Donna saved his ass, and how many times his distracted headspace put them both in harm’s way unnecessarily. It had been a mistake getting that close, a mistake letting himself indulge in Jason’s touches and praise and affection.

 _We were lonely_ , he tells himself. And it’s true.

 _It meant nothing_ , he tells himself. That’s less true.

 _This changes nothing_ , he tells himself. That’s a lie, but a comforting one.

The most dangerous kind of lie, one he’s compelled to believe for nothing more than self-preservation.

Of course, self-preservation means jack-shit when Jason comes to him covered in blood – some his, some not his (and Dick drowns that knowledge in sharp sensations and the broken glassiness shining in Jason’s eyes) – and slots their mouths together like it’s natural. Right.

He comes to Dick smelling like smoke and brimstone, destruction and chaos, and Dick accepts him too easily. Too _willingly_. His lips open for Jason’s easily, shifting against his consuming warmth with that awful familiarity. He can taste tears on his lips as Jason invades – taking what he wants and what Dick offers – but he can’t tell who they fall from.

There’s something soft and sensual here, more candlelight than forest fire, and they feed it gently, carefully. Both warmed by it.

He tastes Jason like he’s a fine wine, finding each flavor lingering in his warm depths and carefully cataloging it. The spray of blood on Jason’s lips is bitter. Their tears are salty. The cigarette is smoky. Dick’s name is sweet, like melted chocolate as it slides from Jason’s mouth to his.

There’s no rutting or _fucking_ , it’s something more dangerous than happens as their uniforms are removed. Pieces are taken apart delicately and placed aside with care they hadn’t offered in their previous union. It’s slow and sweet enough to burn.

It tastes like spun sugar in Dick’s mouth, a warm fuzz that’s intoxicating. The numb warmth spreads as they feel each other out, as Dick tastes each scar against his lips, mapping out Jason’s body like an astronomer maps out the stars. Jason’s every bit as careful as Dick is, both unwilling to severe this careful fragility, this mutual admittance of vulnerability with little more than caresses they can’t admit are loving and a consummation they can’t admit is anything more than sex.

They meld together to the point where Dick is Jason and Jason is Dick. He doesn’t know anything outside the slow burn of affection coiled deep within, settled like a rattlesnake tightening around its prey. He doesn’t know anything outside of pleasure – _his_ , _Jason’s_ – and the fullness that comes with it. He doesn’t know who does what and whose skin is whose, whose lips are whose, but it doesn’t matter.

This pleasure drowns out the pain. This warmth drowns out the cold.

Gotham’s icy in her embrace – hollow and echoing, filled to the brim with ghosts and broken promises and lies and pain – but Jason’s warmer than anything Dick’s felt in years. The grief is pushed away the closer Jason gets, the more they touch. Every aligned inch of skin against skin drives the world away, to the background.

This time, Dick gives into far more than carnality.

And it’s all the more dangerous for its softness. Not all weapons are deadly, after all. Some poisons taste sweet when they go down, and this might just be the sweetest poison yet.

* * *

**Present**

* * *

His apartment is quiet when he arrives, empty and absent of the warmth Donna’s presence offers. She’s busy with the League right now – on a space mission to Tamaran, he thinks – but scheduled to come home next week. It’s almost a relief to have the silence. To be _alone_. She’s tried to get him to open back up about Jason since the initial confrontation, but he’s managed to clam back up. He likes things separated, clear boundaries, and walls with no permeations or leaks. Jason stays in Gotham and the rest of the world stays anywhere _but_ Gotham, except the boundaries are disappearing. Donna knows, and it’s a matter of time until someone else knows. It’s a damn miracle no one figured it out before with how many alleyways they’ve fucked in, how wrapped up in each other they are. It’s not even slightly subtle, but they should have been more careful.

Donna shouldn’t know, but she does. She won’t tell anyone, but someone else _will_ figure it out. Jason still doesn’t know Donna knows because Dick hasn’t told him. He doesn’t think Jason will handle it well and Dick’s really not good at talking to him when he gets in one of his moods. Jason’s broken in so many ways that sometimes all Dick can see is the necrotic tissues where living flesh should be. All he can hear is that proof of death, and videos of torture with scars to match. All he can smell is decay, the way he’d imagined Jason to be for so long. All he can taste is bitter grief, for Jason and the boy he’d been, for Bruce and the father he’d been, for Alfred and the caretaker he’d been. It all poisons his perception of his lover, bitters the sweetness, dulls the burn, ups the ache.

Jason’s traumatized in ways Dick will never fully understand. He has night terrors and sleepwalks, sometimes standing on the roof of one of his apartments staring at the ground with a look of serenity that shakes Dick to his core. He can’t handle excessive softness or having sex in the light. He has issues with praise, and sometimes their consummations and mistakes feel like a self-flagellating expression of self-loathing as mutual as it is painful. Jason can’t trust Dick fully, and Dick’s still too angry to bother overcoming that barrier. Jason’s too uncaring of what the world would think, selfish in his possession of Dick, and Dick cares too much.

Neither wants anyone else to know of course, but for different reasons.

Feelings and thoughts pound like a war drum against his skull, rattling the bone furiously until his vision blurs the slightest bit with reflex tears. He can’t hear them over the expressions running across faces, normally. Can’t hear them over the pressing judgments of those around him, real or perceived. He sees vindication everywhere he looks, always careful of it, careful of the tightly clenched secret permeating the careful normalcy he maintains with Donna. With this apartment, despite only being here every other week.

His thoughts are painful white noise when others might see them, might see his figure intertwined with Jason under the cover of night, might see the anger suppressed under layers and layers of denials and lies and half-truths. Dick doesn’t like being seen. Not when what he is now is broken; _undeniably_ broken. Changed. Altered. Shifted. _Corrupted_.

Dick feels off-balance still. For all his efforts of adjustment, he’s still in freefall waiting for the impact. Roots uplifted; foundation gone. Everything seems shaky when nothing is constant, and not even his relationship with Jason helps him find stability. Not that he should have expected it. He should know better than to _expect_ – abandonment requires expectation, without one, the other can’t persist.

He drops the duffle bag on his kitchen floor with a sigh, the beginning pangs of hunger clawing at his stomach. He’d meant to eat yesterday, but Gotham hadn’t allowed him the time, not with Ivy and Harley’s new team-up and Dent’s persistent need to be noticed.

Every bone in his neck seems to crack when he rolls his neck, and he nearly cries in relief as the migraine lessens in intensity. Dick’s careful to steer his thoughts away from the other aches and pains his body suffers from, afraid to linger on anything too _Gotham_ in his sole safe haven from it.

The fridge, of course, is full of leftovers. Only a few days old, each with a sticky note from Donna that’s some variation of _eat, you fool_ with a tiny heart at the end. It makes him smile, despite how tight the cheerful stretch of skin feels. Smiling less is probably the smallest thing to have changed in the last year.

“Love you too, Girl Wonder,” he murmurs affectionately, snorting at the microwaving instructions she’d taped over the keypad. It’s almost like she doesn’t _trust him_ —

And, as if she’d been listening for that, the backside of the note reads off, _I trust you with my life, but not my food._

Dick rolls his eyes but punches in the specified digits and plops in the container of noodles and spicy chicken with a creamy sauce he can’t remember the name of. The microwave hums as the tiny container circles around in it, reminding Dick of the way Jason’s heart sounds settled against Dick’s ear. A quiet throb, slow and trusting, all the more painful for its vulnerability. The ding of his food’s completion shakes him from reverie before he has the chance to push it away, and he can’t say he’s ungrateful.

It smells delicious, and the flavor is pleasing on his tongue. He hums around it, savoring the taste of Donna’s creation with a rare feeling of contentment. He lets himself have another sigh, feeling the exhale shudder through him a moment after the air leaves his lungs. It feels steadying, settling, and Dick continues eating in silence.

He’s only just finished washing the container and fork when Jason’s ringtone floods the serenity of the kitchen, loud and obnoxious enough to prick at Dick’s receding migraine.

He weighs the pros and cons of answering or just _hanging_ up so he doesn’t have to talk or deal with anything, but he picks it up with a flush of annoyance. He’d only just left Jason’s safehouse after all. They’d spent the week together in between cases and fights carefully deescalated with pointed words and a cool tone so Jason doesn’t spark _Dick’s_ temper. There are no compromises or blissful ignorance if they’re both frothing at the mouth. It’s why their time apart is so important. It offers an opportunity to breathe without the risk of offending the other.

Better yet, his apartment doesn’t smell like gunpowder and blood.

It’s always better to just answer and get the conversation over with, no matter how much he wants to not talk for the next forever.

“Hello?”

Jason doesn’t respond, but the sharp intake of breath gives him away. Dick knows the sound intimately: as well-cataloged as the low-pitched groans Jason gives when Dick’s mouth works its magic in just the right-wrong way.

“Jason,” Dick says irritably when he remains silent. “I know it’s you.”

Jason swallows audibly, and Dick can sense the tension in him, even without the luxury of seeing it expressed in a furrowed brow or clenched fists ( _or a trail of corpses,_ part of him whispers, cold and sharp in the previously warm apartment). Dick shivers and tries not to think of the way he’s never rejected or acknowledged Jason’s darker offerings. Never stopped him from leaving the truly fucked up like courtship gifts for the world in general and Dick in particular.

“ _Why did you tell her?_ ”

Dick chokes back the weary sigh, silent and as tense as Jason. Any merriment he’d felt evaporates, replaced by that cold agony of contention, the tang that comes with their fights. Their relationship is a cycle, after all. Too much good gives way to bad. It’s how they work.

Dick wishes it weren’t so.

“Who?”

Jason gives a sharp laugh, almost mocking.

“ _Donna. Why did you tell her when we—”_

“I didn’t,” Dick interjects, “she figured it out herself. Probably because _someone_ leaves hickeys all over my throat until I look like I’ve been mauled.”

His tone’s flat despite the attempt at levity, lips frowning despite the effort he puts into making them _smile_. Smiling is so hard, suddenly, like little weights sit at the corners of his mouth to keep it downturned.

“ _Dick—”_

“Not to mention,” he says quickly, uncaring of the frustration he’s sure Jason is feeling at being cut off again, “we never actually talked about telling people.” _Because you killed two of the people I’d want to tell most of all._

He bites his tongue enough to not _say it_ , but it takes more energy than it should to dismiss the thought, to keep it from staining his tone. The thought doesn’t linger, but the feelings it evokes do. Grief never accepted; anger never confronted. He ignores that too.

“ _I thought we were on the same page,_ ” Jason says, voice containing a warning note Dick couldn’t miss if he tried. “ _It’s none of their goddamn business._ ”

“This isn’t Babs or Tim. It’s _Donna Troy_. She cares about me, and she cares about you. Of all the people that _could_ have found out you should be glad it’s her.”

“ _I’m pleased as a fucking peach,_ ” Jason hisses. “ _I can’t wait to hear the ‘You’re not good enough for him’ spiel._ ”

“Little Wing—”

“ ** _Don’t_** _call me that._ ”

Dick does sigh at that, running a hand through his hair. Jason’s as unpredictable as ever, and Dick’s _exhausted_. Because his boundaries are broken down and crumbled into dust while Jason erects masonry walls taller than Mount Everest. It’s impenetrable – hopeless – at times. When Dick just wants to comfort him after a memory, when Dick wants softness and Jason needs pain (giving or taking or giving _and_ taking).

A part of Jason will always be dead to Dick, he’s discovered. The boy he’d once been lingers in fragments within this broken man Dick loves, but the whole of him was lost under the ministrations of Joker and Harley Quinn. As always, the reminder brings a different sort of ache. A sense of _longing_ for what will remain lost to time.

Jason Todd hadn’t died, but he hadn’t come back the same. It’s not his fault, but it doesn’t make it any easier to weather. It doesn’t make it hurt any less.

“Jason,” Dick says calmly, “Donna’s not like that. She just wants both of us to be happy.”

“ _We’re a lot of things, Dick, but happy sure as fuck ain’t one of ‘em._ ”

The words resound through Dick like a strike, force distributed painfully and leaving a bruise no one will see except for Dick. It aches, _aches_. There’s no endearment to cripple the blow, no affectionate inflection or pleased lilt. It’s cold and real; the way Jason sounds when he talks about his death.

“Are we really talking about this _now_?” He whispers, voice like glass teetering on a knife’s edge. “You want to talk about this over the phone?”

Jason gives a derisive snort, parting message more of a sneer than goodbye:

“ _We can’t both be in denial about the permanence of this, Golden Boy. It’s only gonna end in blood and tears.”_

The _like everything I touch_ goes unsaid, but it’s felt by both of them in the beat of silence before Jason hangs up.

Dick isn’t strong enough to fight the tears this time. He collapses to the ground and grieves for what he hasn’t yet lost, and what he lost long ago.

* * *

**Past**

* * *

He finds out Jason’s alive in the aftermath. Once again left out of the loop as Wayne Manor burns and Gotham City ascends from the chaos more than a little banged up. It’s Tim that tells him, lips thinned, and ribs wrapped tight.

“Jason’s alive.”

It’s enough to make him do a double-take, tearing his eyes off the stack of notes he’s compiling from patrol (while the hellish events are still fresh and bleeding in his mind). He’d been the last to give up, the last to stop searching and hoping and grieving. It had taken years, _years_ , because every time he’d think about giving up he’d remember the way Jason had flushed when Dick teased him. He’d remember the way he’d melt into Dick’s arms without a second thought, trusting him to take care of it. His Little Wing.

They’d been on the way to something different when Jason had been taken.

It hadn’t died when Jason supposedly had, it still beats brokenly to this day. The potential for more.

Dick blinks at Tim, knuckles white around his pen. He doesn’t notice when he drops it, doesn’t notice anything outside of the static-like shock overtaking his system.

“He’s—?"

“Alive,” Tim says again, sparing Babs a half-hearted smile when she offers him a coffee. “He’s the Arkham Knight. It’s what Harley Quinn used to call him.”

The words wash over him in waves he’s quick to surrender too. The hope is painful, stabbing in its sincerity as he drowns in it.

_Alive. Alive. Alive._

It loops in his head, a song he’s humming with, syllables reverberating through him down to his _soul_. His heart pounds along, every beat a reminder of what he’d lost and now regained.

But then, after the flush of hope, the burn of happiness, the second thing Tim said sinks in. Tim watches him carefully, knuckles white and clenched around his coffee mug. Babs is quiet too, present only in the sound of clacking keys and her decreasingly discrete glances out of the corner of her eye.

“He’s the Arkham Knight?”

Tim nods, jaw clenched, and rolls his shoulders a few times to loosen them. His expression tightens further when his ribs protest the motion, but he doesn’t stop.

Tim stretches across the desk, pressing a few buttons to fire up the monitor Babs isn’t using. The Oracle symbol flickers almost judgmentally, a glowing green that reminds him of the Lazarus Pit. A few keystrokes and the screen opens on a series of clips, collections of things he hasn’t had a chance to review. They’re all dated to today and yesterday, blurred and marked with a blood-red _AK_.

“Watch it,” Tim says softly, eyes a bit warmer than before. He slides the full mug of coffee towards Dick along with the mouse, squeezing his shoulder when he gets out of the chair. “You’re not going to like what you see.”

He hears the quiet press of lips against skin; a murmur of reassurance as Babs wheels out of the room alongside Tim. Dick appreciates the consideration; he’s not sure what it is he’ll see, let alone how he’ll react to it.

With a shaky sigh, he drags the cursor over to the first clip and presses play.

Dick doesn’t like what he sees.

He views it with a distant sort of horror, separate from him and outlined in the haze of gathered tears. He watches every clip, sits through hours and hours of footage and dialogue and threats and _aches_. It’s like a second funeral in a way, more painful than the first.

The first time he’d grieved Jason, it had been barren and cold and numb. It had been depression and apathy and the world spinning and losing all meaning before Dick’s eyes. It had been absence like a missing limb, yearning like a lover waiting for their other half to return from war. It had been a cauterized amputation with the distant pangs of separation without the blood-loss.

This time, it’s full and hot and burning. It’s rage he hasn’t felt since he had his fingers wrapped around Harley’s neck and had to be dragged off. It’s masochistic obsession, a rehash of congregated memories of better times where Jason had flushed and flirted and cursed that only aggravate the bloodied wound of his feelings. It’s an ugly web of poisonous thoughts and feelings, sharp against his heart and ever-tightening around it. There’s no staving off the bloodshed here.

“I’m sorry,” Babs offers with a squeeze to his shoulder. A stray tear leaks down his cheek; a drop of water separate from the flood gathered behind weakening dams. Dick doesn’t summon the effort to smile or relax his tightly clenched fists. He can already feel the crescent marks of his nails engraved on his palms.

Distantly, he wonders if they’ll bleed too.

“So am I.”

* * *

**Present**

* * *

Their relationship lives and breathes on a timer with the light encroaching on its dark temptations. They feel it every time their skin connects, every time their lips meet in a haze of teeth and tongue and copper-stained kisses. The more distant they get, the more they connect. Balance in all things; Newton’s Third Law still at work. They talk less than before, words bearing down on them like the sky atop Atlas’s shoulders. They fuck more, forlorn intentions of reconnecting and holding onto the carnality inherent in their dynamic. He feels nothing without Jason. He feels too much with Jason. He knows it's the same for Jason, he can feel it in every soft touch and smoldering glance. In every softer moment, sensual over sexual, and in every way they express the words neither of them has ever voiced.

Love in bandages late at night, stitches when needed, and cracked lips leaving an imprint of warmth on a cold forehead. Love in meals when one can’t cook or clean or do anything at all. Love in a soothing gravity when one is drowning in dreams and memories and nightmares and fears; shaken and broken and imperfect in every way. Love in intertwined fingers and rooftops and alleyways and everywhere in between.

Their issue has never been love – unspoken or other – it’s been in everything _but_ love.

All the things in between and around and under and _above_. The resentment Dick can’t let go of that Jason delights in. The hatred both of them seep in and devolve to in weaker moments (or _stronger_ moments). The inevitability in their decline. The way the love between them pulsates like a living heart – beating by the mercy ventilators their coexistence supplies – and can’t sustain on borrowed time forever.

They both wait for the flatline in place of measured palpitations, and to their mutual grief, it arrives in the form of more light in place of shadows.

* * *

“How long have you been fucking Jason Todd?” Barbara Gordon asks him one night, returned from her honeymoon with a healthy glow in her cheeks and a tan Dick’s lost through his visitations with shadows.

Of all the consequences of his amour, paled gold skin that’s less bright and rich than it used to be is probably the least painful.

Dick flinches at the coarseness of her words, and her eyes narrow into a glare, pinning him in place like a butterfly beneath the magnifying glass of an entomologist or curious child.

“So it _is_ true. Explains a lot, honestly.”

 _Shit_.

He resolutely looks anywhere but Babs.

“I don’t get it, Dick. How long? _Why_?”

“A year,” Dick whispers, shame and guilt curdling like spoiled milk in his gut. “And I ask myself why every day. No answer is satisfactory.”

She snorts, but there’s no humor in it. It’s cold, jagged, and bitter in a way he understands all too well.

“Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

“Probably,” he replies in the same hushed tone. “But I love him.”

She sighs tiredly. No surprise twinkles behind her glasses and her expression softens just noticeably.

“He murders people, Dick. He’s the reason…he’s _responsible_ for half if not _more_ than half of the destruction that happened. He hurt Tim, and he—”

Dick cuts her off before she can say what they’re both thinking; a wash of grief and a burning mansion.

“I _know_ that, Babs. But…I can’t stop loving him. I can’t stay away. It’s…addictive. He loves me too, and he’s so _hurt_ by everything. He was tortured for months on end, that changes a person.”

“It doesn’t excuse his actions,” she says flatly, but not without sympathy. “It doesn’t make his _continued_ actions acceptable. How many people has he killed in the last year, I wonder?”

“I don’t know,” Dick lies, but a hundred names flicker behind his eyes before he can stop them.

Her eyes glint; she knows the names too.

“It won’t last. You can’t ignore it forever. He won’t stop.”

“He could,” he says, but neither of them believes it. “Maybe, someday, he could… _stop_.”

Her hand is warm on his shoulder, the same one she’d squeezed after he’d watched all the videos and cried over Jason for the first time in years

“He won’t.”

There’s no uncertainty in her voice, no ground to give.

They both know she’s right, as much as it hurts.

“I know.”

He doesn’t have the tears left to cry, but his body shudders all the same.

* * *

Jason doesn’t say anything the next time they meet, but the knowledge sits in the space between them. He knows Barbara knows, knows _Tim_ probably knows, and it lingers in the tight line his mouth makes.

No smiles offered, no soft words or terms of endearment. Their mouths slot together out of habit, greetings unnecessary and unspoken as he’s pushed against the wall and taken apart. There’s a desperation Dick can taste in their coupling; tears leak down both their faces and taint their kiss with salty wetness. Jason’s teeth are sharp against his throat, biting more than kissing, brutal enough to draw blood with the bruises.

The wall holds him up, but he feels weak and vulnerable against Jason. Skin glides against skin, painfully hot and hollow at once. Lips meet absently, tongues slide and twist and taste. Jason’s eyes glimmer in the dark, like a lighthouse in the mist, and Dick tries not to let his own pain show too much. They both feel broken, like glass fragments forced together with glue and duct tape. Every touch aches, but the ache is better than its absence.

Jason pushes. Dick pulls.

They’re both left bloody in the end; colored in purples and blues and reds.

Dick doesn’t realize until later that it had felt like goodbye.

* * *

**Past**

* * *

They only discuss Jason’s morality once, early in their relationship when Dick’s not yet weak, not yet so desperate to keep Jason that he ignores every red flag and warning sign cropping up on the way to their mutually created Hell.

“Could you stop killing?”

Jason looks at him with something distant and painful glimmering in his cobalt eyes, like he’d been somewhere else before Dick had spoken.

“Maybe,” he answers quietly. “Someday. I’d…maybe.”

Dick never did ask again.

* * *

**Present**

* * *

Jason’s apartment is empty when he lets himself in, absent of weapons or food or electronics or _anything_. The furniture’s covered in cloth sheets that feel cold and clinical when he looks at them, and the counters have a thin layer of dust Jason would never allow for.

He feels his heart beat in his throat – painful and raw – as he steps into the hall leading to the master bedroom. It stops when he opens the door, an ache that’s as separate from him as the grief had been, so long ago.

The bedroom is just as empty as the kitchen and living room, the bed absent along with the clothes. The only drawer filled is the one he’d offered Dick, filled with a few spare changes of clothes and extra uniform Jason always kept for him. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until he sees the note taped to the place their bed had been, covered in a familiar looped scrawl that looks like a cross between messy and elegant. It blurs his vision around the edges, reality merging with fantasy.

When he squints, he can almost see Jason’s shadow tied to his with a little red string, the old myth of soulmates painfully present in his thoughts at that moment. It disappears when he looks back down at the note; black ink colored with tears.

_Maybe someday_

Dick laughs as he sobs, bitter and broken and utterly alone.

How terribly, hideously ironic.

* * *

**_Finis_ **

* * *

_He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me. Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her? Find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?”_

- _Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, First Sonnet_


End file.
